Recommended System Specifications for NAS?

[jasonhickman17]

What are the recommended system specs for building a local NAS server? I am currently planning on using UnRaid and making the server with initially 6TB of storage and planning on moving up to about 24TB in the future as i am assuming that most motherboards will be capable of using 6 Sata ports.

Does the CPU have to be overly fast to run this server? Will two cores be enough? Do you need a lot of RAM if you are going to be using a single SSD as Cache for the file transfers?

Another relatively big question is:

Is there any issue (will gaming performance be hindered) with building the NAS into my own PC such as the build that Linus Tech Tips did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpXhSrhmUXo

Also what is the security like when using a NAS as i don't want the files to have any chance of being lost. I am still learning about RAID arrays and right now i am trying to find an array that will let me use the most storage possible and still have the most security if one of the files were to fail. I am currently thinking that a RAID 5 array will work best for my needs, as i will get the capacity and speed of the first two drives but the third will be almost as a backup to the first two. Not sure how this scales when it comes to six drives whether that would mean that two of the drives are for recovery and the other 4 drives are for storage, i would be able to live with that without issue. Then comes the dreaded viruses infecting the entire array which i think with selective file writing, disconnection of the array when it is not in use and Avast Pro i should be able to cover all of my bases there. If you have any comments on this plan for my NAS it would be a huge help and is not expected!

Thanks for all of the help in advance it is greatly appreciated!

Jason H

 

[bitwright]

If all you want is a simple file server, then you don't need much to run unraid. My unraid NAS is running on a Braswell Celeron N3150 (an embedded chip meant primarily for netbooks). You don't need much RAM either. Right now my system is using about 500MB of the 16GB of RAM installed in it (I had originally planned on using FreeNAS as my OS, which recommends 1GB of RAM per 1TB of zfs storage space, hence all that extra RAM). With this setup I am able to run a few simple plugins and dockers (simple sandboxed virtual machines that serve as unraid's version of Apps).

However, if you are looking to do more with your NAS, like run a plex server on it, you will need more powerful hardware. I think the most resource intensive thing I do with my NAS is run a deluge docker, hence why I am able to get away with such low powered hardware. If you want to run a full virtual machine on there for everyday use, especially if you want do something like what was done in that Linus Tech Tips video, then you will need the hardware to match. What hardware you need basically depends on what you want to do with the NAS.

As for whether of not you should run your main PC off of an unraid NAS via virtualization, there will always be some overhead in running a virtual machine, and while advances in processor technology can minimize that overhead, anything running in virtualization will still not be running as fast as if it were running natively. Plus there may be some other quirks associated with running a virtual machine. If I were you I would keep my NAS and PC separate, or, if you really only want one machine, just load up your PC with harddrives and use it as a makeshift NAS (ie. forget unraid and just do everything in windows).

As for file security and the possibility of losing files, it's always possible with a NAS. As many people will tell you, RAID is not a backup. Parity will help you rebuild a single lost drive, but if you lose multiple drives at the same time you will lose data. If you really want to keep your files secure then you will want to back them up in some way, preferably off site (ie. in the cloud).

Just one more note, since it sounds as though you're a bit confused: you are aware that unRAID does not use RAID, right? Hence the "un" in it's name . Unraid keeps the disk in its array separate - it doesn't do any striping - but it sets its shares up so that files on different disk still appear in the same share, so they look like they're on the same disk to the end user. The downside to this is that you don't get the performance boost of RAID. The upside is that there is less chance of catastrophic data loss (ie. you lose everything) and it's easier to expand your array with new drives.

Like RAID 5, unRAID uses parity to allow for a single disk failure without data loss. If you lose two disks, however, you cannot rebuild the lost data, but with unRAID you will only lose the data that was on those two disks, whereas with a RAID 5 array you would lose everything. RAID arrays are also not very easy to expand, whereas with unRAID you can just pop in another HDD. It's for these two reasons that I choose to go with unRAID over freeNAS or NAS4Free in the end, despite the performance differences.